Using adjustment layers to add spice to Premiere's bland transitions

Using adjustment layers to add spice to Premiere's bland transitionsby Greg Andonian on May 17, 2012 at 8:57:32 am

(I posted this in the Premiere Pro forum, and was curious to see what people over here thought of the idea)

One of the big criticisms of Premiere Pro from the FCP switchers has been the lack of good transitions. This is a criticism I wholeheartedly agree with- but with CS6 I've found a remedy, which I think will be good to give transitions pizazz and originality even after the built-in variety gets improved.

What I did is start with a 6-frame cross dissolve, then put a 12-frame adjustment layer directly over it. I then added a gaussian blur to the adjustment layer, and keyframed it to start at 0 then go to 200 right over the cut, then back to 0 at the end. The end result was a "blur dissolve".

I then played around with it a bit, and had it also became high in contrast in the middle, and tried a couple other effects, and really liked the results I got.

The effects that are applied to the adjustment layer can be saved as presets, and you can also set the duration of an adjustment layer in the project panel by right-clicking on it, so you could create one just for putting over transitions, then apply a preset to it.

There are a few more steps involved in this, but I thought it opened up a lot of possibilities. Having the entire arsenal of PPro's effects available to liven up transitons is pretty cool.

(Now, if only you could use adjustment layers to change the SCALE of clips below them- then you could re-create that cool "cross zoom" transition from FCP...)

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